This building had ten-foot ceilings, which didn’t give Ray much room to show his skill, but it was immediately apparent he had some. “Wow!” Doug cried, leaping to his feet. “What a visual!”

“It’s wonderful,” Marcy said, in awe. “Just wonderful.”

They all loved it, and all got to their feet now as Ray moved horizontally along the wall, just beneath the ceiling, until he reached the rear of the building. There he made the turn onto the back wall and continued on as far as the first window, then descended easily to the floor. There, Darlene gave him a huge bear-hug and kiss that made him blink, but then he grabbed her and gave her the kiss right back again.

The gang’s acceptance of Ray now, as they congratulated him and patted him on the back, was so clear that it became apparent, by contrast, that they had not actually accepted him before, but had just been going along with Doug with a wait-and-see attitude.

Andy, when the congratulations died down, asked Ray, “So how do you do this? Single-o?”

“No, I had two or three guys I’d work with,” Ray said. “I’d go up a wall to some window nobody’d think to lock, let myself in, come downstairs, deal with any alarms and then open the front door. Usually then I’d leave, I wasn’t gonna carry a lot of stolen goods around with me, and later they’d give me my share.”

Andy approved. “That sounds like a very good plan.”

“That’s why,” Ray said, “when the crew got caught, and nobody could figure out how they got into the place, somebody finally squealed, you know, for a better deal—”

“Always,” said Tiny.

“Ain’t that the truth,” said Ray. “So they had my name, they had a witness, but he’s a guy under indictment and they can’t really prove anything against me. I kept saying it was a mistake, all I am is an actor, I’m no human fly, so what could they do? I got leaned on a lot but then they hadda let me go.”

“Good thing for us,” Stan said, which was the final seal on Ray’s acceptance.

After that, Doug said it was time to quit for the day, they’d all meet again on Monday to start working out the story details, and then, when everybody left, Doug took Marcy to lunch at a diner near the tunnel (wow!), where she spent the first part of the meal trying to absorb it all. “That Ray,” she said, still in wonderment.

“Babe told me he’d done some shady stuff in the past,” Doug, said, “but he didn’t say what. Maybe he didn’t know.”

“You know, Doug,” Marcy said, her mind beginning to work again, “that kind of gives us our opening, doesn’t it? The first scene of the first episode.”

“Tell,” he said.

“We open on Ray,” she said, waving her fork, on which a piece of chicken breast was cooling, “climbing the outside of the building on the corner.”

“The Chase bank.”

“Either corner, whichever works. We see him looking in windows, climbing all the way up, then going across the roof and back down the other side to the roof of our building.”

“And over the side,” Doug said.

Marcy nodded. “That’s right. He goes down the back of our building, where nobody can see him. He’s alone, so there’s no dialogue, just city noises. He looks in windows, and when he looks in at the storage place he does a big reaction. Then he leaves, and he goes to the bar, and he tells the others what he’s seen.”

Beaming like a lottery winner, Doug said, “Take the weekend, Marcy, write it up, we’ll lay it on the guys on Monday. All of that movement without dialogue. What a grabber. We’ve got Rififi here, Marcy. Write it up!”

NOBODY WAS HAPPY with the meeting just past. Once Doug and Marcy had walked away southward, waving and smiling, cheered by recent events, and once Ray had hailed a cab to take himself and Darlene somewhere else, the two of them also expressing pleasure at the unfolding of their adventure, the other five stood on the sidewalk on Varick Street and frowned together.

“Dortmunder,” Tiny said, “this is not good.”

“I know that,” Dortmunder said.

“Nothing is happening,” Tiny said.

Dortmunder nodded. “I know that, too.”

Kelp said, “The trouble is, these clowns are in no hurry to get their reality up and running.”

“And meanwhile,” Stan said, “what are we doing on our own plan? Nothing.”

“We don’t have a plan,” the kid said. “We have a door we can’t get through, to something we don’t know what it is behind it.”

“I can feel,” Tiny said, “discouragement creeping on. We gotta sit and meet.”

Kelp said, “You mean tonight, at the OJ?”

“No,” Tiny said, “I mean now, at Dortmunder’s. Stan, use your cell, order out a pizza, extra pepperoni, I’ll whistle up the limo.” And he stomped off around the corner, to the limo he never left home without, due to his size and his disinclination to rub shoulders with the civilian world.

“Tiny’s right,” Stan said, breaking out his cell.

“Well, yes and no,” Kelp said. “Get two pizzas, one with hold the pepperoni.”

Midafternoon at the Dortmunder abode, May still at her supermarket checkout register, pizza shreds and beer cans creating their festive litter across the living room, and Tiny saying, “We don’t have all the time in the world like those reality geeks.”

“We’ve only got,” Kelp said, “until they try to check the IDs we gave them.”

“I do have this situation,” Stan said, around a mouthful of pepperoni. “On account of my Mom, they got my last name and her home phone number.”

“That’s an easy one,” Tiny said. “I already got that one scoped.”

Everybody wanted to know how, so Tiny told them. “They’re not gonna come back at us about the phony names and the phony Social Security numbers until the earliest Tuesday, so before then, we see Doug, we explain we threw Murch out.”

“Hey, wait there,” Stan said. “Threw me out?”

“Everything,” Tiny told him, “takes place in that building on Varick, everything they know about and everything they don’t know about. Where’s the driving?”

“Gee, you’re right,” Kelp said.

“Hold on a minute,” Stan said. He was about to get on his feet.

The kid said, “No, wait, Stan, you don’t get it. Monday we tell them you’re out, and anything that happens after that you aren’t part of. You set up an alibi for whenever it is we do whatever it is we’re gonna do—”

“About which,” Dortmunder said, “it wouldn’t hurt to do some thinking.”

Stan said, “But I’m not out. Not out out. Just as far as those people I’m out.”

“There’s gonna be driving, Stan,” Kelp told him, “only they don’t know about it.”

“We can say,” the kid said, “this new guy means the pot’s smaller all the way around, so we gotta unload somebody to bring the numbers up, and Stan, you’re the guy. We’ll tell him Monday.”

Tiny said, “Quicker than that. Dortmunder, you and Kelp go by his place tonight, tell him the story. Then he’s got days and days to get used to it. Murch is out, the human fly is in.”

Kelp said, “Speaking of, whadawe thinka this human fly?”

“He’s a human plant,” Tiny said.

“Yeah,” Kelp agreed. “They put him on us to watch us, but why?”

“Because,” the kid said, “they’re afraid we might start thinking about Combined Tool, as long as we’re in the building, and they wanna know if that happens.”

“Which brings me,” Dortmunder said, “back to my point. When do we start to think about Combined Tool?”

“Tonight,” Tiny decided. “When you’re done with Doug, and later on tonight, we all come to Varick Street. I’m not gonna run around on roofs, so at one o’clock I’ll be at the front door. In the limo.”

Dortmunder said, “Tiny, would there be room in that limo for an extension ladder?”

Tiny lowered a gaze on Dortmunder, thought a moment, then smiled, an unusual and not an entirely comforting sight. “That would be a first, wouldn’t it?” he said. “You’re on.”